Fifteen minutes before his shift was to end on November 8, 2017, Lariat Rope, a thickset man of 55, tumbled into a pit of scalding water at Sapa Extrusions North America in Phoenix, an aluminum-products plant where he’d worked for more than 25 years. It took rescuers three hours to retrieve his body from the pit, which is used to cool aluminum logs 10 inches in diameter and up to 18 feet long. The cause of death: “multiple trauma due to blunt force injuries, drowning and thermal injury,” according to a report approved by the Industrial Commission of Arizona in April.
The commission’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, known as ADOSH, cited Sapa for violating a standard requiring employers to install “covers and/or guardrails … to protect personnel from the hazards of open pits, tanks, vats [and] ditches.” It proposed a fine of $7,000 — the amount it had established for violations that “caused or contributed to a fatality” and which, according to the ADOSH field operations manual, cannot be reduced by that agency.
Nonetheless, the industrial commission — ADOSH’s overseer — pared the fine to $5,250 “based on [the] employer’s quick abatement” of the hazard, according to a handwritten notation on the April report. “My brother’s life has more value than that,” Rope’s sister, Evelyn Hinton, said in a recent interview, recalling his devotion to their elderly parents. “Five thousand is just not cutting it.” Rope was married and had two sons.
Arizona is among 26 states and two territories (Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands) that manage their own worker-safety programs, as they are allowed by law to do — providing the programs are “at least as effective” as the one run for the rest of the country by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Some meet or exceed this threshold; others fall considerably short of it.
